Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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1167. To ask the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection the estimated annual cost of a one-off social welfare bonus of €1,000 for all essential workers who worked through the Covid-19 pandemic including but not limited to health, food retail, food production workers and transport workers. [41237/21]

Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael)
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To accurately estimate the cost of providing a once off payment of €1,000 to essential workers, consideration would have to be given to which employees constitute essential workers and how they may be identified and verified as such for the purposes of any such payment.

The CSO's quarterly Labour Force Survey (LFS) categorises all persons aged over 15 in employment in the State, according to the sector of the economy they work in. According to the Q1 2021 LFS, published in June, the numbers employed in each high level NACE sector are provided below.

The NACE sectors above, which align most closely with the Deputy's description of essential workers in the health, food retail, food production and transport sectors would be: human health and social work activities; wholesale and retail trade, repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles; accommodation and food service activities; and transportation and storage.

The cost of providing a one-off bonus of €1,000 to all 771,800 workers in these sectors would be €771.8 million.

Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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1168. To ask the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection the amount paid out annually in rent allowance in 2019, 2020 and to date in 2021; and the projected amount for the remainder of 2020 and 2021. [41240/21]

Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael)
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Rent Supplement provides short-term income support to assist with reasonable accommodation costs of eligible people living in private rented accommodation who are unable to provide for their accommodation costs from their own resources and who do not have accommodation available to them from another source.

The Department is currently reviewing performance on each of the Departments schemes to inform the financial requirements for the remainder of 2021 and for Budget 2022 in October 2021.

The table below details the expenditure on rent allowance for 2019, 2020, 2021 (Jan to Jun) and the full year 2021 Estimate for rent allowance contained in the Revised Estimate of Expenditure (REV) published in December 2020.